Vista folder security.... in xp?

Hello! :)

Having a huge problem here. I had Vista on this machine and instead of formatting the hard drive, I bought a new hard drive and installed xp on it so I could still use all the things I had saved on my old hard drive.

Here is my issue, the drive that had vista on it is still using vista's crazy security features on the folders. I can right click a folder and uncheck "Read Only" and then go right back to it, and its checked again. I cannot update, delete, or modify in any way these folders and files. I would also like to delete the windows folder on that hard drive, but I cannot.

If there is no way to do this in windows, is it possible to open some sort of dos or shell file viewer so I can delete things this way?

In a big rut here and any help would be HUGE. Thanks for reading!

Indeed its the Windows security that is not allowing you to modify the rights to those folders and files. If possible then boot the Vista with original hard drive and change the rights using the same login from which the files and folders have been created.

Also you can get the data by using some recovery softwares. Take a look at this threads for the same.

http://forums.techarena.in/hardware-...ls/1032316.htm
http://forums.techarena.in/vista-help/979519.htm